Overview
The eMar approach is developed to facilitate extensive participation of the European maritime public, business and research community in a knowledge development process leading to the specification of the e-Maritime Strategic Framework. The emphasis will be in multiple iterations across different stages and with different stakeholders.
The objective of e-Maritime is to make maritime transport safer, more secure, more environmentally friendly and more competitive. For this, e-Maritime must ameliorate complexities that hinder networking of different stakeholders, help to increase automation of operational processes particularly compliance management and facilitate the streaming of synthesised information from disparate sources to assist decision making.
The development of the e-Maritime Strategic Framework will include the following key aspects:
- A number of market surveys to be conducted by a leading company in this field to identify business drivers and requirement priorities of different stakeholder groups
- Stakeholder needs analysis, using knowledge of technology and architectural capabilities from projects such as MarNIS, Freightwise, EFFORTS, Flagship, SKEMA etc to identify new processes and functionalities.
- Identification of implications for standardization and standardisation strategies for areas that cannot be relied upon being developed in other places.
- Measures to address legal and organisational inconsistencies at national and regional levels, human factors and change management issues.
- Interfaces with SafeSeaNet, e-Freight and e-Customs, National Single Windows, Galileo and e-Navigation developments.
- Cost-benefit analysis for new business models (and corresponding legal changes) relying on e-Maritime services.
Furthermore, the project aims at developing an e-Maritime Platform: a comprehensive software infrastructure to support the management and implementation of the e-Maritime Strategic Framework by providing
- A repository (a storeroom) from where e-Maritime Applications and Services may be downloaded
- A ‘run-time’ environment that supports operation and interaction of the e-Maritime Applications
- A software development environment for producing of additional e-Freight Applications and to integrate them with existing ones
Finally, the project will provide a broad range of typical e-Maritime services such as security and safety management, legislation and regulation compliance, shipping, port operations, and transport logistics.